eBook - Silverpop

Email Must Embrace Its
Inner Rock Star
What do you think email
Q: needs to do to keep
getting respect from people?
Isn’t it getting a little dusty these
days?
I have a riddle for you. How is email
A: marketing like Madonna?
Both are headliners, with staying power and
strong track records. Both make millions and
reinvent themselves constantly to adapt to
changing tastes.
But they also have to compete for the spotlight
with brash newcomers. Lady Gaga borrows
from Madonna’s repertoire.
Similarly, social media, “apps” and mobile marketing
are the shiny new toys that make email
marketing look stodgy and “so Web 1.0.”
Email marketing needs to remake itself from
top to bottom – not just how we do email
marketing, but how we talk about it with others
and the values we use to promote it.
It’s time to reposition email marketing with
key people like colleagues outside the marketing
department and the C-suite executives
who control the budget.
We have to find and communicate email’s inner
Lady Gaga — the eye-popping, sexy qualities
that keep email marketing a robust headliner
year after year.
Let me be clear. This isn’t the 947th piece proclaiming
email marketing isn’t dead. In fact, this
ebook could also be about search marketing,
which has also fallen victim to shiny-toy syndrome
and needs its own Lady Gaga reinvention.
No, this is about changing email marketing’s
image from the “boring old workhorse,” as so
many of us refer to it, into the hip, leading-edge
revenue-generating machine that it has become
for so many companies.
Not Your Father’s Email Marketing
For years, email’s backers in the industry have
trotted out the annual DMA report showing
email marketing has the highest ROI of any
marketing channel.
However, naysayers and executives discount it
because email is so “cheap” to produce and send.
That’s like dissing wines from Chile because they
cost less to make than French wines.
Email marketers encourage this shortsighted
thinking when they give their own programs the
“same-old, same-old” treatment, not trying to
stretch the boundaries.
We need to show that there’s a new email in town.
Email is a Content Technology Platform
Here’s what’s cool about email marketing: It might
not be as sexy as an iPad app, but it has become a
content aggregator, pulling multiple technologies
and types of content into a single platform.
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